War may be hell, but it's worth remembering

It is said that all politics is local, meaning personal. And so, increasingly is remembrance. On Remembrance Day 2003, John Howard will achieve a personal aim. He will stand alongside the Queen and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the official unveiling of the Australian War Memorial in London's Hyde Park.

The Prime Minister had previously indicated that, if he chose to retire some time this year, the event would take place after Remembrance Day 2003. To some extent this can be explained by John Howard's liking for pomp and circumstance - especially in the presence of the royal family. But, above all, his commitment to this project is essentially personal. The Prime Minister wants to honour his father Lyall and grandfather Walter who fought together on the Western Front during the latter stages of World War I - and to all the men and women who served in all other commitments engaged in by the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

When prime minister, Paul Keating also did much to focus on the fallen as well as the returned. It was during his prime ministership that the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier was created within the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Keating was much moved by the fate of his uncle Bill Keating, who became a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese and perished on the Sandakan death march in 1945.

In recent years there has been a surge in the interest about those who fought in Australia's various commitments during the 20th century. This is most notable among younger Australians.

Once again, the personal explains the phenomenon. A growing interest in genealogy has made an increasing number of Australians want to know about what their ancestors did - in peace and war. Consequently, many Australians have learnt about, and/or visited battlefields and cemeteries to honour a great grandfather, a great uncle or a father.

There is also an increasing awareness of the war-time sacrifices of women, not only as nurses but as mothers and wives. The impact of grief on an isolated nation far from the battlefields of Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific, is well covered in Joy Damousi's The Labour of Loss.

Increasingly Australians are telling their memories of mourning.

In the author's note to his play The One Day of the Year (1962), Alan Seymour referred to "the essential hollowness of the Anzac Day maunderings". In his early 1970s song And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Eric Bogle asked of the Anzacs "what are they marching for?" David Williamson's screenplay for Peter Weir's film Gallipoli ran a they-died-in-vain line. In his A Concise History of Australia (CUP, 1999) Stuart Macintyre maintained that "younger Australians are hard-pressed to distinguish the combatants (of 1914-18), much less the passions that animated them".

In more recent times, there have been some reassessments. Seymour has related how he now feels a "squirm of embarrassment" when he re-reads his comments of four decades ago. Williamson declared that, after meeting some old diggers, he "couldn't jeer at war any more". And Macintyre's prognosis has been disproved by the large turnout of young Australians each Anzac Day, most notably at Anzac Cove.

The they-died-in-vain thesis was never a majority view in Australia during any conflict in which the ADF fought.

From 1901 on, a majority of Australians have understood the importance of alliances with traditional friends, initially Britain and, later, the US. That's why the Australian relationship with Britain will remain strong - irrespective of whether Australia continues to be a constitutional monarchy. And that's why the Australian-American alliance seems likely to remain popular. Memory, plus genealogy, plus readily available travel to faraway fields, on which relatives once stood, seems to ensure this.